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Jackal
Jackal (ジャッカル), also distributed under the title of Top Gunner, is an overhead run'n gun-style shoot 'em up video game by Konami released for the arcades in 1986. The player must maneuver an armed jeep in order to rescue prisoners of war (POWs) trapped in enemy territory. Plot The Jackal unit is an elite group of four soldiers that have undergone a harsh training regiment to survive in any environment. The team is composed of Colonel Decker, Lieutenant Bob, Sergeant Quint and Corporal Grey. They have been given a mission to drive two armed jeeps into hostile territory in order to rescue and extract POWs. Ports NES Jackal was released for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) on September 1988 in North America. Despite the fact that the arcade game was distributed in the U.S. under the title of Top Gunner, Konami decided to release the NES version under a different title to avoid confusion with their video game adaptation of Top Gun. The NES Jackal has the following differences from the arcade version: * The two player jeeps are now colored differently due to hardware's graphical limitations. Player 1's jeep retains the standard green coloring, while Player 2 controls a brown jeep. * The player has much more space to maneuver due to the change from a vertical orientation to a horizontal one. * The game is now divided into six stages instead of taking place in one long level. Each stage features a different boss awaiting at the end, which include enemies not seen in the arcade version such as missile-spitting statues, a battleship and a new final boss (a giant flamethrower equipped tank; which can be destroyed effectively by machine gun). * The grenade/missile launcher only needs to be upgraded three times to reach its maximum power rather than four. However, if the player loses a jeep, he will revert to the initial grenade launcher instead of being downgraded to its previous level. * The player's jeep can carry as many POWs as there are in each stage rather than being limited to just eight. While there are no point bonuses for delivering POWs in succession, the player's grenade/missile launcher will be upgraded by one level when a certain number of prisoners are taken to the chopper. * Three hidden power-up icons have been added: a green star that adds an extra jeep to the player's stock, a red star that kills all on-screen enemies and a flashing star that upgrades the missile launcher to the highest level. These can only be found by launching grenades or missiles in certain hiding spot. A Japanese version was released for the Family Computer Disk System (FDS) a few months earlier on May 2, 1988 under the title of Final Command: Red Fortress. This earlier version lacks some of the content that were later added to its NES counterpart due to the fact that it was released in disk card format rather than on a ROM cartridge. Namely, the stages in the FDS versions scrolls vertically only, have different layouts and are much shorter as a result. The beach stage is not featured in the FDS version and thus, the ruins (Stage 2 in the NES version) serves as the introductory stage instead. Other platforms In Europe, Konami released ports of Jackal for the ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC and Commodore 64 in 1988. An MS-DOS version was released in North America in 1989 alongside a different Commodore 64 port. These versions were roughly based on the arcade game. A ROM image of the NES Jackal is included in the Windows PC compilation Konami Collector's Series: Castlevania & Contra released in 2002 in North America. However, the game is inaccessible by legitimate means and can only be found by extracting it from the executable. The game is virtually identical to the original NES release, aside from the updated copyrights date. On July 29, 2009, Konami released a mobile version of Akai Yōsai for feature phones through their Konami Net DX service. This version features the added content from the NES version of Jackal, as well as improved graphics much closer in quality to the arcade version. An unrelated mobile version of Jackal (also based on the NES game) was released by Konami for the Chinese market on August 5, 2010. The arcade version of Jackal was released for the Game Room service on October 27, 2010. Category:Video Games Category:Arcade Games Category:ZX Spectrum Games Category:PC Games Category:Commodore 64 Games Category:Mobile Games Category:Xbox Live Arcade Games